A 0.71-mW Antenna-Coupled On–Off-Key Receiver for Gbps Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communications

This article presents a 39-GHz 800-Mb/s antenna-coupled ON–OFF-key (OOK) receiver with a baseband output capable of driving a 50- $\Omega $ load. The antenna-coupled receiver demonstrates a bit error rate (BER) of $10^{-3}$ over a range of 18 cm while dissipating only 0.71 mW for a record energy efficiency per distance metric of 0.049 pJ/bit/cm. A wireline version of the receiver achieves a record sensitivity level of −36 dBm without preamplification while dissipating only 1.15 mW, resulting in an energy efficiency of 1.44 pJ/bit at a BER of $10^{-3}$ . Including 11.5 dB of RF gain prior to the wireline receiver, 800-Mb/s communication is demonstrated at 3.67 m for a BER of $10^{-5}$ . The low power consumption and long range make this receiver suitable for scaling to hundreds or thousands of elements in massive multi-in–multi-output (MIMO) arrays for next-generation millimeter-wave wireless communications systems.